Battle At the Likewise Roundtable!

I disagree with so much in Suat’s recent post it’s difficult to know where to begin. But perhaps I’ll start here.

The plot [of Potential in summary is simple: Ariel goes to high school, “discovers” that she is a lesbian, meets other girls and has occasional sex and alcohol.”

Um…no, i’ts not. The plot of Potential does begin with Ariel discovering she’s a lesbian. But it focuses on her developing, and increasingly disastrous, relationship with one particular girl, Sally. That development is not “simple” either — Sally and Ariel’s characters and interactions are both complex and nuanced. As an example (and to help Suat with a scene that seems to have left him non-plussed) — Ariel’s decision to have sex with a boy before she turns 16 is clearly linked to her general obsession with ritual rights-of-passage. That obsession (which isn’t spelled out — you have to be reading carefully enough to actually follow what the characters are doing) becomes a major bone of contention with Sally, and is tied, too, into Ariel’s general possessiveness and control issues.

I could go on; those themes are also linked, for example, to Ariel’s increasingly fraught interactions with her parents. But the point is: the relationship between Sally and Ariel is absolutely central to both Potential and Likewise. Yet, in his 2000 plus word review, Suat mentions Sally exactly once (when he, again somewhat bemusedly, discusses a scene where Ariel imagines her girlfriend turning into an alien.)

Suat’s a very intelligent and perceptive critic. So how exactly did he go about missing the main narrative and thematic feature of not one, but two books? Well, I think he did it this way:

I found little here which was emotionally moving or disturbing… I literally had difficulty concentrating on the comic from panel to panel.

Suat missed the plots of Potential and Likewise because he found the books so boring he couldn’t pay attention to them.

I don’t actually have a problem with that. Different people are interested in different things. Some people don’t like metal. Some people don’t like horror films. Some people don’t want to read yaoi. And some people don’t want to read journals (which Suat refers to disparagingly throughout his essay), or read about the trials of queer youth, or look at visual art which isn’t polished or accomplished in a particular way. That’s the way it goes.

Ideally, a critic would realize when his or her disinterest in generic and formal elements is so overwhelming as to be essentially insurmountable. Suat doesn’t do that here, unfortunately — instead he doubles down.

Noah would say in Schrag’s defense that this betrays a lack of interest on my (or other like- minded reader’s) part in the life and thoughts of teenage girls. I would suggest rather that it betrays a lack of interest in the life of just any teenage girl. In the same way that not all autobiographies are worth reading, not every teenage journal is worthy of our attention or approbation.

The point I think is that Suat is only interested in teenaged girls if they make art “worthy of our attention.” But…what if, just as a possibility, the disinterest in the everyday life of teenaged girls actually prevents you from noticing art that might be worthy of your attention if it were about something that you found more absorbing?

As an example of how such a blind spot might work…here’s Suat giving my review of Potential what for:

Where Berlatsky sees sublime confusion, I see only a poorly edited journal. I much prefer the artist who prunes and refines a piece to one who rattles on however authentically. Quite simply put, these are comics which contain little in the way of beauty of form or language.

So, reading that little bit, you’d think that I admired Schrag’s work for its “sublime confusion,” and authenticity — because she was punk rock, and just let her feelings flow.

But here’s my actual last paragraph from that review:

Schrag herself never comes out and says any of this; indeed, her touch with the material is so deft that it’s easy to feel that she’s not shaping it at all. She could have written with a heavier hand, spelling out every moral ambiguity and explicating each psychological nuance. Instead, Potential is messy and confusing, filled with shifting perspectives, odd random details, and sudden moments of despair and love. If it were easier to classify, it would have a larger audience, but it wouldn’t be nearly as great.

I do talk about the book’s messiness, but I explicitly say that this messiness is a result, not of authentic spewing, but of her deft touch. I note that it’s “easy to feel that she’s not shaping” the material — by which I quite clearly mean that she is shaping it, and very carefully too. In fact, one of the reasons I have trouble writing about Schrag (which I do) is that I think her writing, plotting, and characterization is extremely subtle. You really have to pay attention to figure out what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. I often have the uncomfortable sense that she’s smarter than I am, which, for a critic, is somewhat intimidating.

Anyway, the point here is that Suat spends his entire review soundly trouncing me for an opinion (“authentic unmediated autobiography is superior!”) that I don’t hold. I like Likewise better than Fun Home not because I think Fun Home is too artificial, but for almost the opposite reason. I think Fun Home is too clumsy.

Again, Suat’s usually a good bit more perceptive than that. I think it’s just hard for him to believe that anyone would find Schrag’s comics subtle — and no wonder, since, as we’ve established, he finds them so off-putting for various reasons that he has difficulty even figuring out the plot.

For the most part, Suat’s review is hard to get too upset about…his prose is, as always, enjoyable, and, since his eyes are closed throughout, he isn’t able to land too many punches. The end, though, crosses over from merely exasperating into something more problematic. Suat starts this final section by defending Kristian Williams, who I had accused of condescension. Suat’s riposte is more effective than perhaps he intended — certainly, Williams doesn’t look very condescending at all compared to Suat.

Even highly individual works have the capacity to appeal to certain sections of society. Potential speaks distinctly and eloquently to the milieu being depicted within its pages as well as those who feel that almost inexplicable “connection”. Works like these make little effort to draw in readers beyond their narrow confines. This is both one of their deepest strengths and greatest weaknesses.

For those left unmoved by Schrag’s narrative, the text remains of passing interest as personal history, social anthropology and as evidence of the growth of a young writer on her way to better things. Time will tell but I have my doubts if this will be a work which most will look back with reverence and affection in the coming decades.

I think Suat is actually trying to throw me (and Schrag enthusiasts generally) a bone here…and I wish he’d just stuck to castigating her and us. Because it’s in trying to explain the appeal of Schrag’s work to others that he most explicitly naturalizes his own alienation. Folks like Suat who find nothing in Schrag are, he suggests, the normal baseline, on the right side of posterity. Schrag’s work as it stands can only appeal to a small in-group (of young people, queers, and fellow travelers, presumably). Schrag is for for the few, whereas something like Maus is, I guess, for the ages, since everyone wants to see poorly drawn middle-class male mice whining about their relationships with their fathers at interminable length. (Plus…the Holocaust!)

This particular argument — that Schrag somehow has innately limited appeal — resonates in really unfortunate ways with mainstream discussions of queerness, of women, and of kids. Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Suat disliking the book, nor in his attempting to explain why in terms of craft, theme, writing, or what have you. But in the last couple of paragraphs, he seems to be trying to cast the book onto the dustbin of history because it appeals to groups of people whose stories Suat isn’t especially interested in. Since those groups of people also happen to have suffered from various kinds of political marginalization, the implications of Suat’s argument here are not happy ones.

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Noah, I know this is the same boring argument that you’ve been having with Luke since the dawn of time, but… Aren’t you engaging in kind of a reverse snobishness by sneering at middle-class white males who whine about their relationships with their dads? We’re people too, you know. I agree that Spiegelman can be annoying, but you seem to imply that his experience isn’t even worth writing about.

Sorry if my line on the tcj board about you and weird gay manga shit seemed homophobic or was just lame.

I’m sure someone could tell a middle-class white guy whining about his dad story that was worth reading. (Freud’s Totem and Taboo can actually be seen as doing this in a bizarre way, and it’s fantastic.) I find Spiegelman’s approach especially tedious, though. And I think this sort of thing tends to be treated as universal and important because of who it’s about and what the theme is (fathers! fraught! Holocaust!) even when it’s really no more relevant than many other story, and more poorly told than most.

Oh! Can’t believe I hadn’t thought of this. I just read Terry Eagleton’s memoir “The Gatekeeper,” which is about his father, among other things. It’s very funny and smart…and part of the way it’s smart is that it is aware of some of the political and genre implications of this kind of memoir, and deliberately grapples with them.

“But…what if, just as a possibility, the disinterest in the everyday life of teenaged girls actually prevents you from noticing art that might be worthy of your attention if it were about something that you found more absorbing?”

Isn’t this just a roundabout way of saying what I predicted you would say in my review (and which you quote)?

Not being interested in the journal of one teenage girl and one journal doesn’t mean a lack of interest in the journalistic form or teenage girls in general. In the same way, just because you’re not interested in Clowes or Ware doesn’t mean that you’re not interested in the comics of all middle-aged white males. If people like Jack accuse you of this, it’s only because you’re so consistent in your disdain for anything to do with the sad lives of that subset of humanity. So much of Fun Home is from exactly the same period Schrag talks about in her comic if filtered through the mind of a grown woman. I liked it because it didn’t choose to go down the same route as books like Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby.

I just get tired when these stories are told in the same way, which is why I think Likewise is the superior book and why I think it is likely that Schrag will turn out to be a very good writer in the coming years or a respected cartoonist if her draftsmanship and cartooning skills improve. If I were her, I would choose the former since it pays better but if you love comics to bits, there’s no other way about the matter. Potential isn’t the work she will be best remembered for – that’s all I’m saying in the final paragraph of my response.

“Folks like Suat who find nothing in Schrag are, he suggests, the normal baseline, on the right side of posterity. Schrag’s work as it stands can only appeal to a small in-group (of young people, queers, and fellow travelers, presumably)… in the last couple of paragraphs, he seems to be trying to cast the book onto the dustbin of history because it appeals to groups of people whose stories Suat isn’t especially interested in. Since those groups of people also happen to have suffered from various kinds of political marginalization, the implications of Suat’s argument here are not happy ones.”

Nah, I refer you to Fun Home again which is gay as hell and still managed to appeal to a whole lot of people. The gay community is a cornerstone of the American artistic community, it’s not some small in-group. I mentioned those two Iranian films in my blog entry for a reason: one is about Iranian women in general (undoubtedly a repressed though vibrant group of people) and the other is about a leper colony. I have even less reason to connect with either of those stories but I did. Art can be universalized without losing its essential message. Putting aside the issues of marketing and Schrag’s chosen artistic medium, I would suggest that Potential failed to make the leap in this regard.

Oh, I should add that I don’t even consider Maus among my favorite comics. I think Raw was an incredible achievement though.

“Isn’t this just a roundabout way of saying what I predicted you would say in my review (and which you quote)?”

I didn’t think it was that roundabout! Predicting a criticism doesn’t actually negate the criticism, though.

Moving down the list: I didn’t say that it was the gayness you found off-putting. I listed a number of possible reasons for your disinterest. If I had to put money, I’d bet on the unpolished art first, and then the diary genre, and then the age/high school experience.

In any case, I think in a lot of ways young people are actually significantly more marginalized in our society than gay people are. There isn’t even a word for disliking young people, after all; it’s just assumed that everyone does.

“Iranian women in general (undoubtedly a repressed though vibrant group of people) and the other is about a leper colony.”

Those are both much more high-art validated subjects than Western teen girls. I mean, by a lot. Nobody would say that those subjects were banal. Everyone would say that the experience of teen girls is banal.

“Art can be universalized without losing its essential message.”

This seems like pure gobbledygook to me. If you like a piece of art, say you like it; if you don’t like it, say you don’t. The claim that you don’t like it because it fails to speak to some universal human experience is just bullshit, and really presumptuous. Why are you better positioned to see what’s universal than I am, or than Schrag is — or than the market is, since you seem to be flirting with that as a justification? If you’ve got a beef with the book, explain the beef (which, to be fair, you do a certain amount of.) But don’t drift into subcultural anthropology. It’s insulting to everyone.

“Fun Home is from exactly the same period Schrag talks about in her comic if filtered through the mind of a grown woman. I liked it because it didn’t choose to go down the same route as books like Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby.”

I haven’t read Howard Cruse, but it’s bizarre to me that you’d praise Fun Home for taking a road less traveled. Everything about it seemed so predictable to me…

Oh…and re: the ineffable sadness of middle aged white dudes and their daddy issues — it’s true I don’t like those narratives especially. It’s not because I hate middle-aged white dudes (I’m one myself!) It’s because I think those narratives have political and social implications which I very much dislike. So if the accusation is (as it seems to be) that I have some sort of ideological opposition to that kind of story — then, yes, I have an ideological opposition to that kind of story. (Which isn’t to say that I haven’t indulged in that mode myself from time to time.)

“If I had to put money, I’d bet on the unpolished art first, and then the diary genre, and then the age/high school experience.”

You would win big if you put almost all of your money on the your first point (though I’m not specifically talking about the draftsmanship here).You would lose if you put any on the last two.

“There isn’t even a word for disliking young people, after all; it’s just assumed that everyone does.”

Huh?! So I don’t live in the U.S. but it’s generally assumed that most people treasure the presence of young people where I live.

“Nobody would say that those subjects were banal. Everyone would say that the experience of teen girls is banal.”

Surely you must be joking – just look at the response to a film like Rosetta (17 year old girl). The film was made by white males but that doesn’t automatically disqualify it from the line of thought you’re addressing here. I hope you’re not going to say that the film was mainly was about poverty and the edges of society, and not about a valid experience of some girls. Potential was just as much about sex and relationships – two of the most potent subjects you can find in art.

“I haven’t read Howard Cruse, but it’s bizarre to me that you’d praise Fun Home for taking a road less traveled. Everything about it seemed so predictable to me…”

You know, it’s entirely possible that if I read Fun Home again, I might be as bored with it as you are. But my memory of it is a bit happier. Memory can’t really be trusted though.

Re: treasuring young people. I can’t speak for the rest of the world necessarily, but the U.S. has an extremely fraught relationship with its teenagers. There’s a long history of moral panics surrounding youth culture, and really youth existence. The way kids are treated in high schools here is often more analogous to the way you treat prisoners than to the way you treat people you treasure. Youth and youth culture are fetishized in some ways — but so are blacks and black culture. Condescension, fear, and prejudice around young people are very real, are institutionalized (through schools and prisons especially), and have lots of serious consequences. It’s a live issue…and from my perspective it’s quite relevant to the ways in which Schrag’s work is often not taken seriously.

Similarly, while stories about teen girls can be validated and are certainly consumed, culture *for* teen girls is often sneered at and thought of as banal. Twilight, shojo, lots of female r&b, etc. etc. That’s why people get defensive when attack that stuff as being shallow or vapid — they hear that shit all the time.

I think Schrag’s work is different from Twilight, shojo, etc. in a lot of ways — but it shares certain characteristics as well (gossipy, about networks of friends and relationships, obsessed with crushes.)

“If I had to put money, I’d bet on the unpolished art first, and then the diary genre, and then the age/high school experience.”

This is probably me more than Suat. I’m very suspicious of diaries and experiential narratives; they do privilege individual experience over larger social dynamics, although they can certainly engage with larger social dynamics. They just insist on individual subjectivity in a way I find unsatisfying.

This is one of the major ways the DIY aesthetic doesn’t work for me — I’m really hostile toward punk period, because it’s such a palpable rejection of the ways in which “all culture is derivative” and of the value of skill and careful engagement with the artistic tradition. It’s very much testing out the resonance of one’s own voice — how loud can I scream? — and the answer is always “so loud that I can’t hear you talking back to me.” It pushes a great big red button for me.

I agree that Schrag tries not to fall victim to this — punk is inherently adolescent, but she actually is an adolescent so easier to cut her some slack, and she’s obviously working toward a goal that’s not particularly punk in the least. But it’s such a big button for me that it gets in the way. Our culture is already too punk, too youth obsessed, even given the various ways in which that obsession is laced with self-loathing.

Does it make me always guilty of discrimination against young people to feel like adolescence should be a stage that one eventually gets out of?

I’m not especially a fan of punk either (though there are many great punk bands.) I’m less opposed to journals as a form, which I don’t think necessarily have to privilege individual subjectivity in the way that you’re suggesting. Schrag’s journals are obsessed with relationships, and while it’s obviously from her perspective in some sense, I think it ends up being multisubjective in a lot of interesting ways (other people’s words are literally throughout all her books.)

I think treating adolescence as more of a phase than, say, your thirties, and the belief that people in that stage are more potential beings than actual ones is really problematic.

Caro: Maybe I’m misremembering a previous thread but aren’t you a Virginia Woolf enthusiast? Don’t like her diaries much? Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain is another diary/journal which rather appealed to me. There’s also a big tradition in journal-like writings among Chinese authors from the early 20th century, some of it very good.

I am far more receptive to the idea that we need to send the 30-somethings to camp than teenagers. I don’t think I ever said anything about the teens. Despite being too old to particularly enjoy reliving or dwelling on adolescence experiences, I don’t begrudge actual teenagers those experiences, good and bad, or their own reflections on their experience.

My point is this: adolescence is a time when it is fully appropriate to be concerned with your own internal identity, with how loud you can scream.

But by the time you’re 30, if you’re still fetishing teenage screams, you’ve got a problem (and there are a lot more ways in which this is a problem than actually destructive pedophilia). The problem isn’t the teenagers — they’re age-appropriate. The problem is middle-aged people who are still fascinated by adolescent things at the expense of grown-up things.

That’s how I took Suat’s point about the banality of teenage life: just that for an adult to get something out of a teenage memoir, there has to be something in there that is age-appropriate for the grown-ups. Hence what he said about Fun Home.

Well, I obviously feel like there are lots of things in Likewise and Potential and Schrag’s work in general that can speak to adults. I don’t know that the experiences are all that different in some ways — love and relationships are obviously things that are age appropriate for everyone, though they may be differently inflected.

” The problem is middle-aged people who are still fascinated by adolescent things at the expense of grown-up things.”

It seems like this is more of a problem with super-hero books — though the really depressing things actually happen when the childish stuff is turned age appropriate. I enjoy super-hero comics written for kids, but the stuff that has been updated with sex and violence to appeal to my demographic can be fairly tedious.

Suat — I am indeed a Woolf enthusiast and I do like her diaries. I don’t really think of them as in the same category though as her novels, and I think Likewise is trying to be a diary/novel, not just a diary. However, Woolf does challenge the diary genre somewhat in her novels, especially in Mrs Dalloway, the one most closely tied to Ulysses. To no small extent, that challenge is because journaling was, at the time she was writing, such a feminized genre.

That’s definitely an aspect of the gender politics that hasn’t come up: diaries are historically considered women’s writing. I will take that as yet another correction to my initial too-facile assertion that the gender issues are resolved here.

But the comparison with Woolf doesn’t really help with my reading Likewise: both Schrag and Woolf take Ulysses as a jumping off point, but Woolf’s books provide a much more grown-up response. That’s to be expected since Woolf was an adult when she wrote them, but having read them and loved them, Likewise doesn’t quite measure up. Likewise might have been more accessible for me had Schrag chosen Woolf as the jumping off point rather than Ulysses, but it woudln’t have sustained Noah’s reading nearly as well and I think Noah’s reading is probably closer to what Schrag was trying to do.

Interestingly, Woolf’s reaction to Ulysses — that it was an incredibly sexist and voiced-masculine work — is very close to how I react to Gravity’s Rainbow. I suppose I should think about why Ulysses gets a pass on that front from me; I think it’s mostly just the temporal distance and the immense intellectualism.

I”ve talked about the gender implications of the diary choice in some of my earlier reviews of Schrag…I think it’s in the Potential review that Suat cites. And there’s this from the Comics Reporter.

I tend to loathe guy autobio comics; they are, as a whole, boring, storyless, solipsistic, and afflicted with the misconception that the author’s genitals are of wide and general interest. But Schrag avoids that whole sensitive-new-age-guy cesspool. Her comics aren’t in the male agonistic tradition of romantic/sexual Bildungsroman — instead, they’re inspired by that most female of forms, the adolescent diary. Thus, where the guys are all about (tragic, repetitive, ultimately self-satisfied) disengagement, Schrag’s comics are a chronicle of connection. Whether it’s the cute boy in her gym class, film star Juliette Lewis, or Chemistry, Schrag is intensely emotionally engaged with the world outside her head. It’s not exactly a surprise when Schrag decides she’s bi at the beginning of Definition — every relationship she has, whether with boys, girls or bands, feels like a crush.

Eric (who’s a Woolf scholar, among other things) doesn’t see Ulysses as sexist, obviously. Perhaps you’re keying in to some of the issues he talks about in terms of gender?

So I don’t live in the U.S. but it’s generally assumed that most people treasure the presence of young people where I live.

Hey Suat,
I think this may be partly cultural? There was a device being touted around here that basically emits a high pitched sonic noise, designed to hurt teenage ears (but not anyone else’s). The idea was it would drive teenagers away from stores or malls or parks, so they wouldn’t bother people. Some people objected to the idea, although it seemed to be mostly on the grounds that it might annoy innocents like neighboring dogs or older folks. :/

Just a datapoint. The US does truly despise its teenage population, especially young girls.

Noah, I’ve already read both of the essays that you gave me links for, but I’ll read the Comics in the Closet one again to look for your take on White Guy Daddy Whining having negative political effects.

I’ll close with some ass-kissing… I really have to give you kudos for bringing something new to The Comics Journal. Before you came along, the magazine’s basic viewpoint was pretty much, “Clowes, Ware, Spiegelman, and literary comics are great; genre stuff sucks; and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.” But your Shadow of No Towers review seemed to come from a somewhat different perspective, and you kept pushing it from there. I actually like the old party-line a lot better than your perspective–I’m a big fan of Clowes and Ware, I have zero interest in Twilight, and two of my favorite writers are Philip Roth and John Updike, who seem like the platonic ideals of everything you hate in literature. Also, I’m like Luke in that some of your gender studies stuff really creeps me out–I’m kind of horrified that any straight man could be a big fan of Andrea Dworkin, for example. But I have to salute you for challenging my point of view.

I hope you won’t write a lengthy essay on the repressed homoeroticism and fears of heterosexual inadequacy that clearly lie at the heart of this post.

Though I should say too…I think Dirk probably deserves more credit than me for bringing a new perspective (if new perspective there is.) I’m certainly not the only one at the journal now interested in shojo or Ariel Schrag or gender studies. I wasn’t even in Dirk’s great shojo issue, which was the watershed moment, if anything was.